[This article was published under
the title “A PrincipledDiscussion of
the Taboo Against Homosexuality” in the Conservative Review, March/April
1995, pp. 27-29.]The Conservative Revolution Makes It an Ideal Time for a Principled
Discussion of the Taboo Against Homosexuality

Dwight D. Murphey

American society has been under enormous pressure in recent years to
repudiate its traditional taboo against homosexuality. So long as the
supporters of mainstream society fail to articulate their reasons for the taboo
in a manner consistent with the principles of a free society, the campaign
against the taboo will be seen as occupying the moral high ground. In this
article, Professor Murphey expresses the view that the "conservative
revolution" that is now under way should cause us to reexamine the reasons
for the taboo, leading to its reaffirmation.

_________________________________________

A number of practical issues relating to homosexuality have been forced upon
the country by the campaign for "homosexual rights" in recent years.
The conservative landslide in the recent elections means that all of them need
to be revisited.

None of them will be discussed openly and satisfactorily, though, if Americans
find themselves unwilling to confront head-on the central issues of principle
and practicality: Is a taboo that is designed to keep homosexuality out of view
consistent with the principles of a free society? And, if so, are there
important reasons to maintain the taboo?

In what follows, I will want to discuss these issues in some depth.

In my own analysis as a "classical liberal" who favors a society
based on individual freedom, I begin with a libertarian presumption. I would
place the "burden of persuasion," to borrow a legal term, on those
who advocate any taboo. To be defensible, a taboo must be justified by needs
that are important to a free society and that outweigh the presumption.

This beginning premise is by no means agreed to by all thinkers who ponder
the principles of a free society. The theories propounded by Ayn Rand and
Friedrich Hayek would disagree with the idea that there must be a presumption
against a taboo that invokes only social and institutional pressures. The
concept in "coercion" is central to their analysis, and their
definition of it encompasses only physical force. They argue that no coercion
is being used against the subjects of a taboo unless physical force is used or
threatened. This suggests that it is the right of every person, as part of his
liberty to control his own life, to join in asserting any taboo so long as he
doesn't use physical force.

Years ago in my book Emergent Man I argued against this limited
definition of coercion on the ground that immensely powerful coercive effects
can result from actions that use no physical force at all. (For example, a
boycott among food suppliers could starve an individual without anyone ever
lifting a hand.) I believed, and still do, that the theory of a free society
demands a broader definition of "coercion" than simply "physical
force."

Thinkers less inclined toward libertarianism would contest the presumption
against taboos on a very different ground: that every society must necessarily
be, if it is to exist acceptably as a society, a cultural whole, with its own
history, dreams, prejudices and intricately woven consensus. To this view, the
libertarian or classical liberal elevation of individual liberty to the highest
pinnacle is arrant foolishness. There are other considerations, they say, that
far outweigh any claim to the autonomy of individuals.

This latter view is shared in today's world by people of widely differing
outlooks. It is a view held by the cultural conservative, particularly in the
European sense of the word "conservative"; it is held by a whole
variety of points of view based on other cultural or religious perspectives,
such as, say, fundamentalist Islam; and it is generally endorsed by social
scientists and anthropologists as they look at the world's myriad of cultures,
past and present, whose customs vary so greatly. To the latter relativistic
understanding, all cultures have their own legitimacy in their uniqueness
(except that in the context of recent ideology, with its double standards, this
is often denied so far as the mainstream of European and American society is
concerned).

These views have much to tell us. As a classical liberal, I see great
advantages in a society founded on the principles of personal autonomy (which
are principles, we must not forget, that presuppose a rich cocoon of law,
family, institutions, and ethical consensus). But personal autonomy must be
seen only as a primary means and a major end, not as the only value to be
considered. I have come to believe that a free society is best served if it
sees itself not merely as a framework for personal autonomy but also as a form
of advanced civilization and of common life. It is arguably defective to the
extent that people cannot look at it and declare it good in light of the broad
range of values that are important to a high civilization . This calls for its
theory to consider not just the principles essential to personal autonomy, but
also the many values that people hold dear on grounds that are separate from
that autonomy. In the context of our discussion of taboos, these things may
either strengthen or weaken the initial presumption that requires a taboo to
justify itself.

The question is how a taboo against homosexuality fares when judged in such
a way. But before we get to that question we must decide whether we are going
to base our judgment on religious grounds or instead on "prudential"
grounds (i.e., on the advantages and disadvantages to human well-being as seen
without religious criteria). I will base the analysis here on prudential
considerations. These will be important to anyone whose religious beliefs don't
already command an answer and who therefore consider themselves free to weigh
prudential factors, and to others who want to judge social issues by their
effects on human well-being.

Many people today assume that any assertion about sexual morality must come
from a religious perspective. They shrug off sexual morality because they see
no religious compulsion relating to it. What they are missing is a profound
understanding that civilization itself has certain imperatives. Civilized
society, including a "free society" formed around the notion of
personal autonomy, has a number of behavioral preconditions essential to its
flourishing or even existing. These provide an ample basis for a moral code of
civilization, and will be socially enforced within a community that wants to
assure its own health. (Many have called them "natural laws" because
a violation of them leads to damaging and sometimes disastrous consequences.)

From this, we should note that life within civilization, including a free
society, is in no sense "existentially free," as the "do your
own thing" anarchism advocated during the 1960s argued it should be.
Freedom, to be effective and lasting, is the freedom to act as one wishes
within what classical liberals used to call "ordered liberty." It is
"liberty under law," and moreover, liberty within an ethical
consensus. It is not a freedom devoid of responsibility. An intricate web of
responsibility forms the atmosphere within which the liberty is to exist.

The question of whether a taboo against homosexuality is justifiable is
really a question of what social imperatives weigh against homosexuality, and
further of what weight they are to be given as against the initial libertarian
presumption.

One imperative, of course, is public health and the protection of innocents.
Even if homosexuals didn't care about their own health, a protection of
innocents such as hemophiliacs, medical workers, the children of an infected
parent, not to mention taxpayers and medical insurance payers who bear much of
the cost of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, must weigh heavily in
the balance. How many innocent lives, and how much expense, does it take to
outweigh the presumption in favor of personal autonomy so far as homosexuality
is concerned? .

This by itself would be considered conclusive if it weren't for the blanket
of ideological protection that in recent years has been spread over the whole
AIDS phenomenon and over the privacy of homosexuals. "Political
correctness" has forced us to ignore the obvious and to allow the
forfeiture of a good many innocent lives in its name. It is in no sense extreme
to say that both promiscuous homosexuals and those who insist on political correctness
have been guilty of a willful and wanton disregard of the lives of others.

Concerns over public health wouldn't weigh so heavily against a monogamous,
non-promiscuous expression of homosexuality. That wouldn't nearly so much
threaten the spread of disease (even though anal intercourse has that potential
in any context). But homosexuality takes such intense forms and is often so
promiscuous that it as an open question whether homosexuality could settle
generally into a monogamous form. Unless there are good reasons to think that
it will, there should be no facile acceptance of the assertion that "of
course it can." We live in a time when statements are insisted on as true
even when they have no evidentiary basis and are merely ideological assertions.

Going beyond the issue of health, a second imperative is that there be a
sexual ethic that leads to marriage and familial responsibility. The
civilizational need, especially in a free society, for a code of conduct that
reenforces marriage and responsibility toward family has been almost totally
ignored by the liberal ethos in recent American society. The consequences of a
massive number of illegitimate births and of single-parent families amount to a
social crisis of immense proportions within the black population, and the same
problems are growing among whites. The epidemic of crime and of gangs is
directly related, as well as many other social ills that tend to be seen as
separate problems.

The sexual morality essential to a free society is built on two
fundamentals:

. First, the extent to
which civilized values are served by marriage; and,

. Second, that norms directing sexuality
into marriage are necessary if marriage is to be a satisfying and stableinstitution. Stable family units serve several
crucial social functions in a free society: they decentralize child rearing,
which is essential if the state is to be kept limited; they provide the love
and attention that children need to grow into productive and responsible
adults; they provide mutual support among the family members, reducing the need
for governmental welfare; they do much to address the criticism that has often
been made of a free society that it doesn't provide an adequate cocoon of
"community" for the individual; and they are valuable in themselves
through the love and fulfillment they make possible.

A sexual ethic that gives marriage a virtual monopoly over sexual expression
creates an impelling reason for people to accept the responsibilities of a
permanent relationship with a member of the opposite sex and with a family.
George Gilder has made a good point about the need to civilize the male, but it
is broader than that. The inducement to marriage and family requires a sexual
ethic; and the stability of marriage requires that the permanent relationship
between two people and their children not be undercut by less than full
faithfulness to it. All of this involves the need for more than a mechanical
set of rules: the ideals that it represents need to become indwelling within the
civilized man and woman. A sense of sexual and familial honor is essential,
with an accompanying sense that less than that is dishonorable.

Ironically, the society that is best positioned to be tolerant toward
homosexuality is one in which homosexuality is kept essentially private and the
society as a whole is on sound ground, with a consensus supporting family
responsibility and moral sensibility. The irony comes from the fact that it is
precisely that sort of society that is also best positioned to understand the
reasons for a taboo against what it considers an aberration. There is less
tendency to allow aberrations when the main ethic is strong, even though the
very strength of the ethic makes the aberration much less potentially harmful;
the contemporary period shows that there is a vastly greater tendency toward
allowing aberrations when moral sensibility is weak.

In my book Emergent Manmore than thirty years ago, I argued for a
tolerant attitude toward homosexuality on libertarian grounds. But during those
thirty years the ethical foundation that I was presupposing for our society has
undergone an alarming erosion. There is no longer an indwelling sense of honor
and of dishonor in sexual matters, no longer a pervasive sense of what is
important to civilization. This goes far beyond sexuality and into personal
responsibility of all kinds. Because of this, the drive for an acceptance of
homosexuality takes its place as just part of the crumbling of standards and of
the orchestrated campaign since the 1960s against a "bourgeois" moral
order.

The Left itself has been one of the forces that has made this neither the
time nor the place to take homosexuality "out of the closet" and to
proclaim it as an acceptable part of our common life. If we had a powerful
heterosexual ethic, we could afford to say that; but we don't, and to say that
homosexuality is "normal" would not be understood as a permitted
exception; it would be seen as part of the overall "do your own
thing" moral anarchism. Under our present cultural circumstances, the
taboo against homosexuality is not only justifiable in principle, but is
imperative.

A taboo can vary from a mild ostracism to a violent repudiation. There is
nothing about the needed taboo against homosexuality that would justify the
latter. It is our fellow human beings we are talking about, and we value them
as such. So it isn't persecution that a valid protection of civilized life
requires. It is enough that homosexuality not flaunt itself or be put forward
as an acceptable alternative to heterosexual marriage. The word
"propriety" refers to a common observance of the forms of society.
What is needed more than anything else from those who are homosexual is that
they observe those proprieties, which reflect an ethical framework that
addresses issues of a far larger scope.

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When this was published in 1995, Dwight D. Murphey, one of Conservative Review's associate editors,
was a professor of business law at Wichita State University. He is the author of
several books on comparative social and political philosophy.